Creating a Plant-Based Protein Brand with That Protein

This article was created in collaboration with That Protein. That Protein are co-founders of the Health Blog Awards. They are also sponsoring the ‘Best Vegan Blog’ category this year. Get tickets to the ceremony here.

At That Protein, we believe that nature offers the best nutrition.

The motivation for launching a vegan protein company was really simply: it came from the desire to create a different kind of pure, high-quality organic plant protein that would offer something different, with all the flavour and nutrition coming from the raw materials themselves. Nature does offer the best nutrition.

In relation to flavour, we wanted to use the raw ingredients themselves to create our protein mixes rather than relying on chemical flavourings and sweeteners — we never add them to our blends, and this creates a different tasting plant protein.

In relation to nutrition, all the nutrition in our super proteins comes from the ingredients themselves — not from added chemical vitamin mixes. We think this makes us stands out.

Plant-based protein or animal-based sources?

When it comes to choosing plant-based protein sources over whey or animal-based sources, it really depends on what you are looking for. There are people who don’t want to choose dairy products as they find it can lead to bloating, skin problems or — as in my case when I was younger — asthma.

There are others who choose to go for plant-based sources for ethical reasons, i.e if following a vegan diet.

In terms of protein specifically, the amino acid content of our Brown Rice Protein is very similar to whey, whilst our Pumpkin Seed Protein powder is a fantastic complete protein, high in the much talked about Branched Chain Amino Acids. There is an article on our blog about this that may be of interest to anyone keen to understand more about amino acids!

What makes That Protein different to other vegan proteins on the market?

Firstly, our mixes are entirely unique as we create them ourselves — we never use “white label” products. The ingredients are mostly organic and always of the highest quality. We choose to use organic ingredients in our super protein blends for 2 reasons: 1) to make them as free from chemicals as possible and 2) because we believe they taste better and fresher.

The taste is entirely different from other protein products due to the unique blends of protein and superfoods. Our proteins have a particularly natural taste that comes from the raw ingredients themselves and never from added flavourings or sweeteners.

We add superfoods to our products in order to enhance the nutritional content and to complement the protein, which helps to create that special and unique flavour.

Finally, we work exclusively with plant-based ingredients and so get to specialise in plant-based products, rather than just offering a plant protein/vegan option within a range of dairy products.

We work with bloggers to promote brand awareness.

We connect with bloggers who are attracted to the ethos of the brand and who genuinely use and enjoy the proteins. Some very well know bloggers use our products but this is entirely authentic and non-paid, although we are very happy to share our products with like-minded bloggers.

From time to time we commission bloggers to create recipes for the website as we don’t want our recipes to get too “samey” . Then of course we have the That Protein Health Blog Awards which we co-created and co-own with the HBC through which we connect with lots of bloggers from a wide range of backgrounds.

The popularity of plant-based protein has increased in recent years. A lot of this is driven by consumer demand and also by large retailers stocking more — a virtuous circle.

Our most recent flavour (nutty nutty peanut butter) has proved to be a huge hit.

Peanut Butter is such a popular flavour and the challenge was to try to capture that without using an artificial peanut butter flavouring — pretty much the ultimate challenge I wanted to set myself! In creating the flavour we were able to introduce health benefits that aren’t in the other products — eg vitamin B6 which helps to balance hormones — all in a natural way. We created it as a limited edition product but it has been a runaway success so we will now make it a firm part of the That Protein Family.

That Protein are co-founders of the Health Blog Awards. They are also sponsoring the ‘Best Vegan Blog’ category this year.